Horrorfest 2016: Someone's Watching Me!

Now I'll depart from my various lists for one last movie this October, our Horrorfest 2016 finale, SOMEONE'S WATCHING ME! This made-for-TV movie was directed by none other than master-of-horror John Carpenter. He shot it right before he shot HALLOWEEN in the late 70s, and it's hard to find on home video formats, so I was lucky the Hollywood Theatre was showing it the other day. Looks like Movie Madness does have it though, if you want to check it out.

Lauren Hutton stars as an independent career woman who has recently moved into a high rise apartment in Los Angeles. She quickly finds work as a live television director and successfully fends off the Donald Trump-esque advances of co-worker Steve (Grainger Hines). She has a nervous habit of joking around about everything, even to herself when no one's around, and while most of the jokes aren't funny, strictly feeling, it makes the character memorable in a way that many "women in peril" are not, and makes her seem like a real, three dimensional individual.

Hutton starts getting creepy phone calls and weird gifts and notes delivered to her apartment, and we in the audience get glimpses of someone recording his phone calls with her and watching her via a telescope from a building across from hers. There's even an early scene with a legit scare shot where an intruder in her apartment dashes behind her back when she's looking the other way. Yikes!

Since this a made-for-TV movie, it's not as stylish as the stuff Carpenter later became known for, but you can see he's a born director even with these limitations, especially in a suspenseful sequence where Hutton searches her building for the intruder, following him down into the laundry room and eventually hiding in a weird crawlspace under the floor.

The movie is impressively forward-thinking when it comes to gender and sexual politics. Many movies like this take great pains to show how independent their career-woman leads are, but this one goes way out its way to really portray this as a positive character trait for the lead character. Not only does Hutton rebuff the afore-mentioned Steve, she also rebuffs another guy trying to pick her up at a bar, only to immediately turn around at the same bar and choose the guy SHE wants to pick up (David Birney), and run a pick up line on HIM. She's then in charge of that relationship, choosing the man she wants to talk to, pursuing him because he seems nice, etc. It's actually kind of sad how rarely you see this in movies, not just form the 70s, but even today.

On top of that, Adrienne Barbeau plays a co-worker friend of Hutton's who unabashedly introduces herself as gay on their first meeting, and later is impressed that Hutton doesn't seem fazed by it. Hutton just says something like, "Look, I'm around men all the time and that doesn't bother me, so why should you." I mean, this isn't ground breaking civil rights stuff but it is a unique and interesting point of view for a movie that could have been the usual misogynistic crap.

Anyway, SOMEONE'S WATCHING ME! is not a ground breaking masterpiece, but it's better than it has any right to be and is an interesting flick to check out if you follow the career of Carpenter at all. Hell, it's better than IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS, so that makes it the best John Carpenter movie I've seen this month.

Thus ends Horrorfest 2016, another successful foray into the fearful annals of horror films. Happy Halloween!

Horrorfest 2016: We Are What We Are

I went into WE ARE WHAT WE ARE, the 2013 film from Jim Mickle, expecting something different from what I got. Based on the film's promotional poster, featuring a father and his two daughters dressed up and at a nicely-set table, I assumed this was going to be a cynically-toned "look how weird we can be, I dare you to take this seriously." But really, for the most part, it's a dark, depressing, drama. With horror, of course.

Bill Sage stars as the patriarch of a family living in a poverty stricken rural town. As the film opens, a disastrous rain storm floods the area and Sage's wife (Kassie DePaiva) is found dead, seemingly drowned. The sheriff (Nick Damici) breaks the news to the family and Sage's two daughters (Ambyr Childers and Julia Garner) visit the local doctor (the great Michael Parks) to view the body.

So, stop here if you don't want to know any plot secrets. Turns out Sage's family is a group of cannibals descended from early settlers who resorted to cannibalism to survive. In honor of this act of survival, the family eats someone they've kidnapped once a year, after fasting. It's the woman's job to prep and cook the body, so when Sage's wife turns up dead, it's his daughters' turn to play.

Unfortunately for Sage, his daughters are sick of the whole thing and ready to escape. The eldest figures she'll do it this one last time and then they have a whole year to plan their escape before they have to do it again. Unfortunately for everyone, the recent flood has unearthed the remains of some of their previous victims and it isn't long before the town doctor (still the great Michael Parks) starts looking into things. See, his daughter is one of the missing people, probably killed by this family.

Everything in this movie is drab and depressing. The low-income rural town, the rainy weather, the over bearing patriarch. It's almost overwhelming. The cannibal element, of course, keeps you watching rather than giving up in despair, but then that ends up being the movie's undoing in its final moments. The writer/director goes for a final WTF moment to ratchet up the horror but it's so out of left field and so unbelievable, given what we know about the characters, that although it might work from a literary analysis standpoint, it doesn't work from a dramatic one. This last moment is the only time the movie sinks to what you might expect from the poster. Too bad.

And that sucks, because right up until the last moments, this flick is pretty good. Michael Parks is especially strong as the suspicious doctor. It's interesting because he's the kind of actor who could just have easily played the cannibal father. So, it's a stroke of casting genius to have him play the sympathetic doctor. His quest, and Kelly McGillis as a concerned neighbor, are the only rays of hope in the whole movie.

Horrorfest 2016: The Legend of Hell House

Anyone who reads any of Horrorfest probably has caught on that I always bitch about haunted house movies and ghosts because, with a few exceptions (POLTERGEIST, THE CHANGELING), they're usually simultaneously about the supernatural while allowing the supernatural to manifest itself in underwhelming ways. Time and again I say, in real life, obviously hauntings have to manifest themselves in shadows and bumps in the night and cold spots and things like that because there's no such thing as ghosts, so that's all we're left with. In movies, the sky's the limit, so why waste time on bumps in the night and cold spots when you could just literally show me a ghost? Blah, blah, blah.

Anyway, THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE can be added to the short list of exceptions, because it's good. This UK flick from 1973 was directed by John Hough, who went on to direct a bunch of those creepy Disney flicks like WITCH MOUNTAIN and WATCHER IN THE WOODS. 

Clive Revill stars as a physicist who is hired by a millionaire (Roland Culver) to investigate a mansion notorious for being violently haunted. It was once owned by an eccentric sadist whose sex and drug parties led to all kinds of debauchery, up to and including murder, apparently. Revill's job is to prove the place isn't haunted so the millionaire can unload it. Revill will get a handsome sum if he can last a week there.

Revill brings along his wife (Gayle Hunnicutt) and two mediums (Pamela Franklin and Roddy McDowall). McDowall has previous experience with the haunted house, being the sole survivor of the last time anyone dared to investigate the place.

The movie starts with Revill seeming like the main character, then Franklin comes front and center for a while as most of the haunting seems to start to revolve around her and she has most of the early insights into what she thinks might be going on, but eventually towards the end it turns out McDowall's been our main man the whole time, with his at first subtle performance slowly burning into an over the top all out acting assault. In other words, Roddy's good in this.

So's everyone else. For most of the movie I was sitting there trying to figure out why Clive Revill seemed familiar and eventually I ended up looking him up and realized he was the voice of the Emperor in THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, before George Lucas re-made that scene.

Pamela Franklin was in the previous Horrorfest flick, THE INNOCENTS, and is great here at projecting innocence but then able to turn on a dime and get all demonic. 

One cool thing about this movie is that Revill eventually has a plan for ridding the house of ghosts, and it hinges on a piece of scientific equipment. The plan doesn't go down quite the way he intends it to, but I like the fact that he has a plan, and the plan is explained to the audience, and seems to make sense, within the rules of the movie. This is more than can be said for most haunted house flicks, which usually rely on weird magic to fight magic, and not scientific know-how.

Horrorfest 2016: Oculus

Here's another one from the producers of SINISTER, OCULUS, a 2013 horror flick directed by Mike Flanagan. OCULUS tells the tale of a brother and sister who are separated as kids when their father murders their mother. The brother holds a gun on Dad, and Dad forces him to pull the trigger, killing himself and scarring the kid for life. Because he's "shot his Dad," the brother gets sent to a psychiatric hospital, while the sister grows up free.

See, the thing I glossed over is that the kids think a sinister mirror in the Dad's office caused all this shit to go down. By the time the brother gets out of the hospital, he realizes this is ridiculous and just figures Dad was crazy. But, the sister has spent all her time growing up researching the offending mirror, and is more convinced than ever that it's the culprit and must be destroyed.

One of the coolest things about this movie is the methodical way the sister goes about destroying the mirror, and also attempting to prove its super natural qualities. She sets up cameras, has failsafe schedules and stuff, complete with alarms. She's not taking any chances. So many horror movies rely on characters being borderline retarded that whenever there's stuff like this in a flick, it's a nice change of pace.

The other cool thing is the concept: I've never seen a killer mirror movie before, so props for originality. And, the concept is so perfect: the idea that a mirror could mess with your perception so much as to eventually lead to your death is pretty sweet. 

Karen Gillan and Brenton Thwaites play the brother and sister as adults and Annalise Basso and Garrett Ryan play them as kids. All four actors are great, especially Karen Gillan, who projects intelligence and no-nonsense even while dealing with ridiculously supernatural goings-on. Rory Cochrane and Katee Sackhoff play Mom and Dad, and they're around more than you'd think, since the movie frequently jumps back and forth between past and present.

So, OCULUS and SINISTER have similar credits and are made in a kind of similar style, but if you have to see one, choose OCULUS.